Denialism, Nilisim, and the Winds of Change

What a week! Does everyone else out there sense unease in the air? It wasn’t just a bridge that came down last week; it was consistency and reason that suffered catastrophic failure. The walls between chaos and order are crumbling like they were made of soft and brittle clay. And so we enter a theater of the absurd where former rules don’t apply, where charity goes to the rich and the neglected poor are crushed under their own huddled masses.

You might have missed it if you weren’t paying close attention, but we are now giving aid in the form of weapons to some of the wealthiest nations on Earth. This is not to be confused with the weapons sale that President Bush seeks to authorize announced simultaneously, no doubt to confuse the issue. Forget that we have helped turn the Middle East into a violent hellhole and forget that 15 of the 19 9/11 hijackers were Saudi nationals. Forget that at $73 dollars a barrel for oil, Saudi Arabia can afford their own weapons. Forget that this is a brutal monarchy with a human rights record fitting of Stalin’s Russia, Mao’s China, or Pinochet’s Chile. But don’t forget that, despite the abstraction of the concept of foreign aid, every working class American has now put billionaire feudal monarchs on the dole.

Don’t look too surprised. They used to say that charity begins at home. Not any more. So while New Orleans swelters under bureaucracy and neglect, our school busses plunge into rivers off broken bridges.

Don’t look for truth here. You will find only lies. Lies like those found in the tragic accident of Pat Tillman’s death. First it was enemy fire. Then it was friendly fire. Now we learn that he was shot in the head at ten meters. For those of you still metricly challenged, a meter is about the height of a doorknob. Laid out flat, 10 meters is about the length of a large room. And still we are told that the tragic death of Mr. Tillman was an accident. A lot of good people seem to have accidents. The odds of the accident becomes greater as their opposition to a war that they left their multi-million dollar jobs to go and fight goes up.

Add to all of this, financial chaos. “It’s a blood bath” described one Wall Street analysis, of the failure of the “sub prime” mortgage market. On the wall of my ninth grade classroom hung a sign that said, “There is no free lunch”. As a child, I took things quite literally, shocked that “Eleanor Rigby” kept her face in a jar. Now I know what both sayings mean. People put on airs, and you can’t get something from nothing. If only those in the economic sector had my ninth grade education, then they would have know that breathing in the vacuum of the housing bubble might cause some serious gas.

Our foolish military aggression has combined with years of deficit spending and our artificially created wealth to send the dollar spiraling downward, just in time for the coronation of Queen Hillary. Let’s face it. Americans are good at denial, but those in the Republican Party are the real champs. See the country wants change, and with the collective memories little better then that of fruit flies, the country looks to President Hillary Clinton to save the day. I made that mistake of working and voting for a Clinton once before and expecting change. What I got was more of the same. Hillary voted for the war, and while she must now reject it to win the election, don’t think for a moment that she will follow through with that promise any more than her husband followed through with his promises that made that caused an idealistic young Godwhacker to work for his campaign. I’ve seen this before folks. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

“Hairball” Chris Mathews was on TV yesterday talking about how the Republican Party was already resigning itself to defeat in the coming election. With 9 Bush clones in the race, the possibility that they can sell themselves as the change party in the next election is too dim and remote to seep down through their rivers of denial. It reminds me of a scene from my favorite sitcom “Absolutely Fabulous”, where a drunken mother awakens to eye of her disapproving daughter in a room full of empty bottles and says “What do I have to do to convince you I’ve given up drinking?”

Meanwhile, a few networks over, George Streptococcus was holding a “monkey trial” of a debate like the Queen’s court from “Alice in Wonderland”. The idea of asking questions on healthcare and not giving a moment on the subject to the one doctor on the stage was a slight so glaring that it outshined the absurdity of asking a question on tax reform and not giving time to the biggest tax reformer.

So here I sit not knowing whether to amused or disgusted, for it is only when the winds blow against one another that a real storm of change can give birth.